Gunman called 'dazed' before fatal rampage

ENFIELD, Conn. - As Omar Thornton prepared to head off to work at a beer distributorship Tuesday morning, his girlfriend sensed something was wrong.

"He just kept having this dazed, confused look on his face, and I never saw him like that before," Kristi Hannah, his girlfriend of eight years, said Wednesday.

When Thornton, 34, got to Hartford Distributors Inc., a family-owned business in the ethnically diverse Hartford suburb of Manchester, Thornton was confronted with videotaped evidence that he had been stealing beer. Company officials then forced him to resign. Officials say he responded by going on a rampage, killing eight co-workers, wounding two others and then killing himself.

Hannah said Thornton, who was Black, had complained of racial harassment to her months ago and had shared with her evidence of it: photos of racist graffiti and a surreptitiously monitored conversation purportedly involving company managers.

She said that Thornton called his union representative about the problems but that the official did not return his calls.

Union and company officials say that Thornton never complained of harassment and that there have never been reports of racial discrimination at the company.

A union official described Thornton as a dissatisfied worker whose first targets were the three people in his disciplinary meeting: Steve Hollander, 50, a member of the family that owns the company, who was shot twice but survived; Bryan Cirigliano, 51, president of Teamsters 1035 and Thornton's representative at the hearing; and Louis Felder, 50, who news reports described as the company's operations director.